Howard Davies at Literary Review:
Man-Devil is an entertaining exploration of Mandeville’s ideas, which he set out in The Fable of the Bees and other works. Callanan does not pretend that it is a full-scale biography of Mandeville. Indeed his life story, as far as we know it, could be told in a couple of pages. From a relatively prosperous Rotterdam family, educated in medicine at Leiden University, Mandeville was forced into exile in 1693 as a result of the family’s involvement in the Costerman riots, a protest against the activities of tax farmers, private citizens who collected revenue for the government in return for a large cut. He spent the rest of his life in London, working as a kind of psychiatrist with a particular interest in hypochondria. He died there in 1733.
Other than what we can learn from his writings, that is pretty much all we know about him. There is only one personal testimony relating to him, curiously enough written by Benjamin Franklin, who met him in a pub (he was, wrote Franklin, ‘a most facetious, entertaining companion’). But his subsequent reception has been remarkable for a man so obscure.
more here.
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